This study is a corpus-based contrastive study of clause linking (i.e. coordination and subordination) in English, French and Dutch. The key question addressed in the dissertation is whether the three languages show different stylistic preferences as regards their use of clause linking devices (viz. coordination and subordination) and their informational density (clauses vs. phrases). Two research hypotheses are formulated on the basis of the claims found in the English-French and English-Dutch contrastive literature. The first  known as the Dependency Hypothesis'  holds that on the scale ranging from incremental/horizontal writing to hierarchical/vertical writing, Dutch is situated towards the incremental pole, as compared to French, which with its intensive use of subordination is located towards the hierarchical pole; as for English, it is predicted to be situated in between French and Dutch, i.e. to be less hierarchical than French (cf. less intensive use of subordination) but more hierarchical than Dutch (cf. English typically combining style, as opposed to Dutch chopping style). The second hypothesis  referred to as the Sententiality Hypothesis'  relates to English and French only. It postulates that on the scale ranging from sententiality to nominality, English is situated towards the sentential' pole (clausal/verbal style), whereas French  with its relatively more intensive use of phrases  is located towards the nominal' pole (phrasal/nominal style). The corpus-based study partly confirms the Dependency Hypothesis. A comparison of English, French and Dutch original texts (cf. comparable corpora') shows that Dutch is the least syntactically complex language of the three. Dutch sentences are significantly shorter and contain a significantly lower number of subordinate clauses than their English and French counterparts. However, the comparable corpus study reveals no marked contrast between English and French. A careful analysis of translation corpus data contributes to confirming the Dependency Hypothesis further by showing that there is a majority of shifts from coordination to subordination in translations from English to French and a majority of reverse shifts from subordination to coordination in translations from French to English and from English to Dutch. The claim that French is more phrasal' and that English is more clausal' (cf. Sententiality Hypothesis) seems to be overly simplistic. Close inspection of English-French and French-English translations reveals that both translation directions show a clear majority of shifts from phrasal constituents to clausal constituents. This predominance is explained by the presumably lower cognitive processing effort required by the operation of such shifts than by the operation of reverse shifts from clausal constituents to phrasal constituents, the latter generally requiring greater condensation strategies than the former.